Henry Newman’s Storage Predictions for 2014

Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, our favorite storage pundit Henry Newman has posted his annual Review of 2012 and Predictions for 2013. How did he do last year? Well, with 7 of 10 correct predictions, he is either The Great Carnac or he gets a C- minus on a teacher’s grading scale. The question is, will that grade help Henry with his one wish-list item for Santa this year?

The industry really needs more than POSIX (open/fopen, read/fread,write/fwrite) and more than simple REST put/get interfaces for data in the future. Neither has the richness to address the myriad of polices that are needed in our future world. I predict that there will finally be some honest discussion about this among the customers that need it and the vendors that could create it. Maybe this should be my request to Santa. I have tried to encourage this discussion for years and I have gotten no traction.

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Not a skin, theme or otherwise cosmetic novelty, the real thing: an Artificially Intelligent Disk Operating System or AIDOS (ay-dahs or ay-dose, take your pick) if you will. For it to work the way I imagine it, it MUST BE INHERENTLY portable, cross platform and network aware. It MUST also provide an intuitive and natural language interface that can run on virtually an piece of Von Neumann inspired hardware from smart phones, tablets, desktop machines, servers, watches, micro controllers etc. If it cannot be run directly on the hardware, it must still have the capability to access and control it given the proper connection. It must work seamlessly with existing systems and work even better in pure environments. This system would should and could be the thing running everything from manufacturing plants to the autopilot in air and ground based vehicles. Therefore, it must be open source, not necessarily free (although it helps), but definitely open source and developer friendly if people are going to trust it. It should also be capable of recognizing hardware using some form of neural network for analysis and provide the user with any level of access to that hardware that is possible.

I realize that last statement can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, so I shall end my (crude and incomplete) list of demands for my dream system with a single example followed by the proverbial proverb: Software Defined Radio. This technology has seen some interesting progress recently by tapping into some of the more fascinating features of Realtek’s 2832 chip.

So I ask: What if your computer could do this sort of thing automatically, by actually probing, polling and surveying the hardware connected to it and then telling you what its capabilities are and what the OS can and can’t do with it? What if instead of searching for drivers, your computer can build them on its own based on the needs of the user and the resources available to the system?

It seems the best technology is inspired by science fiction and/or nature. So let’s look at more nature and more scifi!

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